Our view: Will the Warner project get green light?

The final stage of renovations to the Warner Theatre is about to become reality, according to Casey Wells, executive director of the Erie County Convention Center Authority.

We've heard this promise before -- one year ago, in fact. "The ball is in our court. It is a matter of putting it all to paper, and our attorneys are working on that," Well said in a Dec. 8, 2011, story. Wells said then that the Convention Center Authority needed to reach a lease-purchase agreement for a parcel of land at East Ninth and French streets, so the Warner stage can be expanded. Wells said the $1.25 million lease-purchase agreement could be ready by late January 2012, with construction then starting in July or August. Now Wells says that the lease-purchase agreement could be in place by the end of this year.

There are many players involved in this project and we understand that government bureaucracy can be slow. NDC Real Estate Management in Pittsburgh owns the property in question, now used as a parking lot. NDC manages Mid-City Towers, the next-door apartment building at 12 E. Ninth St. The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development subsidizes apartments for low-income tenants and also holds the mortgage for Mid-City Towers. HUD has to approve the lease-purchase agreement. "Anything that changes the lease terms has to be approved by HUD," Wells says. "That review process, by them, is under way. After HUD signs off, we can execute the agreement ... and we will have the land needed for the state to release the funds." Can our federal legislators help to speed up the HUD action?

Tom Vicary is chairman of the Warner Trust, which holds $3.5 million in private donations to help complete the final phase of theater renovations. "It's just a case of dotting I's and crossing T's," Vicary says. "And we have no reason to believe this won't be approved."

The Pennsylvania Department of General Services has offered repeated assurances that the state's $11 million share for the renovation project is ready to be released after the lease-purchase deal is final. Under the proposal, the Convention Center Authority would lease the property for $50,000 a year until 2016, when it would buy it for $1 million.

After all those I's are dotted and T's are crossed, however, the public is owed a complete explanation about why this transaction has taken so long to complete. Enlarging the Warner stage and renovating the basement dressing rooms, which are too small and in serious disrepair, was supposed to be the first phase of the Warner project, not the last one. In 2005, our newspaper reported that the ownership of the property necessary for the Warner expansion had been identified as a stumbling block for the theater's renovation four years earlier, in 2001.

The public deserves to know the lost-opportunity cost for a proposed construction project that has not gotten off the ground for almost 12 years.